William Collinge

Two or More Together: Subtle Energies in Relationships*

When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or bronze; and when two people understand each other in their inmost hearts, their words are sweet and strong like the fragrance of orchids. I CHING

Two strangers are attending a workshop on developing intuitive communication. They are instructed to pair off and sit in their partner's energy field for just three minutes, with eyes closed and no verbal or physical contact. For that brief period they are told simply to attempt to communicate with each other through their imaginations. At the end of the three minutes each has attained a remarkable degree of accurate insights about the other's life and has even seen identical images of being in imaginary situations together.

"When I was tuning in to my partner," states one of the participants, "I saw her with shorter hair and an upside-down bicycle. I saw her and me arm in arm. I then swallowed and swallowed and felt as if I had to cough but didn't want to. I swallowed again, but the urge was so strong, I felt as if I were choking. My eyes started to water and I had to leave the room to relieve the choking feeling. The choking and cough then left. [After the exercise] my partner then said she used to have a shorter hairstyle and she had to go to a specialist when she was young because she would swallow wrong and start coughing and choking with watering eyes. When she felt me choking, she soothed her throat as she was taught and my cough left. We both sensed swirling. The amazing thing is that I was actually choking as she used to."

How could such a detailed, accurate awareness of another's life be gleaned in three minutes of sitting together silently?

What these two people have just experienced is called "imaginal communication"** by Henry Reed, Ph.D., a psychologist and researcher in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia. Based on his work leading thousands of such encounters, Reed has found that our imagination is actually an organ of perception that reaches beyond the five senses. "To use a technological metaphor," he explains, "suppose that the imagination were like infrared goggles, granting night vision to see what is not ordinarily visible to the eye. Perhaps the 'eyes of the heart' exist to help us see the spirit of what is happening in a situation, an energy that is often described... as 'invisible forces' or 'vibrations' or simply 'feelings,' but that is no less real...."

Reed uses the metaphor of a magnet and magnetic filings to illustrate how images can arise spontaneously in our imagination as a result of what we are perceiving around us. "If we sprinkle some iron filings on a piece of paper and put a magnet underneath, the filings arrange themselves in a beautiful revelation of the shape and form of magnetic waves. Perhaps f we allow our emotional imagination to enter a situation, the situation itself will be seen to send off 'vibrations' that arrange the images of our imagination in such a way as to reveal what is going on" (italics added).

I find Reed's conception of the imagination as an organ of perception particularly crucial in understanding how we experience other people's energy. When we are in close proximity to another, our energy fields are in a state of communion, overlapping and interpenetrating. Since our mind exists in our energy field well beyond the limits of our physical body, it is "out there" to contact the mental field of the other, as well as to be contacted. The contents of our minds are thus available, in a sense, to be known by someone else, particularly if we are open to being known by that person. In this way, the images that arise spontaneously in our imagination can be taken as real perceptions of "what's out there" in the other's energy field.

This work illustrates what we all probably experience but are often unaware of'that on some level we routinely sense what is going on in others when we are near them, but we tend not to pay attention to those vague images, perhaps considering them as just subconscious noise.' We have not learned how to trust our imagination. Yet consider what is possible for us to experience, as revealed in the comments of a few other explorers after just three minutes of silent, imaginal communication with another:

"My partner and I could feel our energy outside of our body; meeting, actually touching, I could also feel her feelings of happiness, joy, excitement. Because of the experience we do have more of an affinity toward each other. By that I mean we both just feel closer and have more intimate sort of bonding with each other."

"We were so strongly bonded, we had to physically move ourselves back to break the bond."

"I really wanted to stay out there with my partner. I was reluctant to come back. I didn't quite enter back into myself completely. When I returned there was an extra warmth in me, all the way down to my ankles, as if the other persons body warmth was heating me up.

The space between two people'what Reed calls the "imaginal zone"'is a place where real intimacy can happen effortlessly, if both parties are willing to let go of thinking about or controlling their experience.

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* This excerpt taken from the book, Subtle Energy: Awakening to the Unseen Forces in our Lives. By William Collinge, Ph.D. Published by Warner Books, 1998. Pages 109-112.

** This information, and the quotations that follow are from Henry Reed, "Close Encounters in the Liminal Zone: Explorations in Imaginal Communication." Journal of Analytical Psychology, 1996, Vol. 41, pp. 81-116; 203-226.

 

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